Anne, my audiologist, told me to keep a notebook of every new sound, because I would forget how strange they were at first, and because on the bad days it would help to look back. She was right on both counts. These are from that notebook, copied out and trimmed a little. Everyone's first year is different. This was mine.

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Tuesday, December 9, 1997
Switch-on

Anne hooked my processor to her computer and played tones through each electrode, one at a time, asking me to tell her when I could just hear it and when it was loud but comfortable. Beeps. Hums. A sound like a moth at a window. It took most of an hour.

Then she turned on the microphone and said, "Can you hear me, Mary?"

It was a cartoon duck talking through a tin can. Every word squeezed and buzzing and high. But the rhythm of it matched her lips exactly, and my brain grabbed at that and held on. I said, "Yes," and heard my own voice for the first time in two years, and it sounded as though I were talking inside a bucket. Merle said something from the corner. A kazoo. A kazoo with his timing. I laughed and cried at the same time, which Anne says nearly everyone does.

She crumpled a piece of paper. It crackled like bacon in a pan.

On the way home, at the corner of our street, there was a ticking in the car. Small, dry, regular. I asked Merle what on earth it was. He said, "The turn signal, Mary." I hadn't heard a turn signal since 1992. He had to pull over.

Wednesday, December 10, 1997

The house is full of noises. Who knew? The refrigerator hums. I thought it was broken and nearly called the repairman. The furnace clicks and then roars. The kettle whistles in a thin, high squeak like a mouse with opinions. My shoes on the kitchen floor go tock tock. The toilet, I am sorry to report, is the loudest thing in Rhode Island. I flushed it three times just to hear it, and laughed alone in the bathroom like a madwoman.

By three o'clock I was more tired than I've been since the babies were small. Anne warned me. The brain works very hard learning a new language. I'm to wear it every waking hour anyway. Practice is the whole game.

Saturday, December 13, 1997

Birds at the feeder, through the window glass. Chickadees and sparrows, Merle says. To me they sound like someone tapping a fork on a glass, very fast, very far away. But I heard them, and I hadn't heard a bird in years. I stood at the window in my bathrobe until my coffee went cold.

Merle still sounds like a kazoo. I miss his voice more than I can say.

Thursday, December 25, 1997

Christmas at Heidi's. Too many voices at once, a roar like surf. I took the processor off for an hour after dinner to rest. But before that: my granddaughter Emma, who is three, climbed up on my lap and said, "Nonna!" It was a squeak through the tin can, but it was my name, in her voice, and I have never heard her voice before. She was a baby when I lost the last of my hearing. I have known her three years by her face alone.

I didn't tell anyone why I went to the powder room for so long.

Wednesday, January 14, 1998

Another mapping with Anne. She adjusted things, and voices are less ducky. More like people with bad head colds. Progress!

My homework: books on tape from the library, while I read along in the printed book. I'm doing an Agatha Christie. The reader is an Englishman with a lovely deep voice, and I can follow perhaps half of it without looking at the page. Merle and I have invented a game. He reads me a headline from the newspaper with the paper held up in front of his face, and I guess. Today "Patriots" came out as "pirates." Close enough, I said. He said it wasn't, really.

Saturday, February 7, 1998
Merle

I was at the sink with my back to the room. He came in and said, "Good morning, Mary."

And it was Merle. Not a kazoo. Not a duck. His voice. The voice I married, a little gravel in it, a little Pawtucket in the vowels. It came from behind me, where I couldn't see his mouth, and I knew it was him and I understood every word.

I dropped a cup. It broke. I heard it break, too, which was its own small miracle. We left the pieces on the floor for an hour.

Sunday, March 22, 1998
The telephone

My first telephone call in three years. We planned it like a military operation. Heidi called at two o'clock exactly. We'd agreed on the topic in advance (what Emma had for breakfast), and she spoke slowly. I held the receiver up to the microphone over my ear, the way Anne showed me.

Pancakes. Emma had pancakes, with too much syrup, and she got some in her hair.

I understood perhaps every third word at first, and then every other word, and the call lasted about two minutes, and at the end Heidi said, "Bye, Mom, I love you," and I heard it, and I said "I love you" back to a telephone, which I had thought I would never do again. Merle was standing in the doorway with his hand over his mouth.

Saturday, April 18, 1998

Rain on the roof last night. I lay awake listening on purpose. Soft and uneven, like someone drumming their fingers who can't decide on a rhythm. This morning a robin was singing in the maple, and I could hear that it was a song, with phrases, rising and stopping and rising again. I couldn't have told you it was a robin. Merle told me. But a song!

Sunday, May 10, 1998
A bad day

Mother's Day brunch at a restaurant, and it was dreadful. Clattering plates, a hundred conversations, music from somewhere, and all of it the same loud gray roar. I couldn't understand my own daughter across the table. I sat there smiling and nodding, the way I did for years, and hated it, and we went home early.

I'm writing this down because Anne said to write the bad days too. Restaurants are the hardest thing for implant users, she told me, and for people with hearing aids, and frankly for a good many people with perfect hearing. Next time: a quiet place, an early hour, my back to the wall. It isn't failure. It's the work.

Sunday, June 14, 1998
Music, first attempt

I took out my old Bohème, the Beecham recording with de los Ángeles and Björling that I wore thin in college, and put it on, and sat down in my chair, and it was a brass band falling down a staircase. Noise. Clanging, shapeless noise with some kind of tune buried in it like a coin in mud. I turned it off after four minutes and put the record away and went for a walk so that Merle wouldn't see my face.

I knew. They told me music was the hardest and the slowest. Knowing doesn't help as much as you'd think.

Sunday, August 9, 1998
Music, second attempt

Anne's advice: music you know by heart, so your memory can fill in what the implant leaves out. One voice or one instrument instead of a whole orchestra. Read the words along with it. Start small.

So: Mimì's first-act aria, the one where she introduces herself to Rodolfo, which I have known since I was a girl, with the libretto open on my knee. And this time I could follow the line of her voice. Up, and down, and up and holding. Not the beauty of it yet. The shape of it. Like seeing a dear friend's silhouette across a street before you can see her face, and knowing her by the way she walks.

I played it eleven times. Merle went and mowed the lawn.

Sunday, September 20, 1998

Merle came home from the hardware store with an envelope and put it on the kitchen table without a word. Two tickets. La Bohème, a small regional company, a high school auditorium in Warwick, Saturday the 24th of October. Fourth row, aisle. With supertitles.

I said, "What if I can't hear it?"

He said, "Then you'll see it, and I'll hold your hand, like always." Thirty-two years, and he still knows the line.

Saturday, October 24, 1998
La Bohème

I'll write it properly someday. Tonight only this.

I heard it.

Wednesday, December 9, 1998
One year

A year ago today I heard a turn signal and wept on a side street. Here is where I am now, as precisely as I can say it.

I understand most conversation with one person in a quiet room, even without looking. I use the telephone with family and friends, and even, with some nerve, with the pharmacy. Merle is Merle. Emma is Emma; she talks all the time and I hear nearly all of it, which is not always a blessing. Rain, birds, the kettle, my own footsteps, the turn signal. Restaurants and parties are still hard. Strangers on the phone are still hard. Music is coming, slowly, a little more every month, and it isn't the music I remember, and it may never be. I've made my peace with that, mostly. Some music is better than none, and some days it's much better than some.

I take my processor off every night and lay it on the nightstand, and the world goes silent again, and I am a deaf woman. In the morning I put it on and the refrigerator hums. I'd do it all again tomorrow.

~ · ~ · ~

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Last updated Sunday, September 12, 1999